The Land’s Wild Music (Trinity University Press, 2005) is a road book. According to poet Pattiann Rogers “The Land’s Wild Music is the record of a quest, an odyssey, Mark Tredinnick’s journey of exploration. Focusing on the work, the places, and the lives of four major contemporary writers, Tredinnick’s narrative investigates the complex interconnections existing among the land, language, and the human spirit.” My road took me, specifically, through the Cascades in Western Oregon, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. And the four writers I journeyed to and sometimes with were Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. My book is a lyric reflection on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is a nature writer’s roadtrip into nature and into nature writing and into the nature of writing

Redemptive in its vision, sacred, compelling, and challenging in its message,” wrote Kim Barnes. “Mark Tredinnick brings us even closer to what matters in the lives of four of our most important and essential contemporary writers. And what matters most for these authors is exactly what must matter most to all of us: an awareness of how we are connected to one another—and to the land—through language, story, and history.”

“ Timely, original, and beautifully written,” John Elder

One reviewer commented that each of my chapters—each is a journey with one of these writers into their home landscape and into these questions—read like an essay in The New Yorker. Another described the book’s writing as “meditative, recursive, and as lively as the best journalism.”